Keynote presentation at UC Davis Intersex Awareness Week

Intersex Awareness Week is held annually in late February as a time of education and awareness around intersex issues and experiences. It is organized under the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Resource Center. Events vary greatly, from speakers, to activist projects, Intersex 101 and academic discussions of community intersections (to name just a few).

WEDNESDAY 3/2

Keynote: Hida Viloria
7 PM MU II
Hida Viloria is the Human Rights Spokesperson for the Organisation Intersex International (OII), the largest intersex organization in the world. She has a degree in Gender and Sexuality from U.C. Berkeley, and has been on the vanguard of intersex activism since attending the first intersex conference in history in 1996, and appearing in the first intersex documentary, Hermaphrodites Speak. She has lectured and spoken extensively on the topic of intersex, including appearances on ABC’s “20/20,” “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” and the documentary films Gendernauts and One in 2000. Viloria is currently the only intersex person in the world who was not medically altered (either non-consensually as a child or by choice), who openly advocates for an end to so-called “medical correction” of ambiguous intersex bodies like her own. Last October, in the wake of the Caster Semenya controversy, she served, by invitation, as the intersex representative at the International Olympic Committee’s meeting of experts in Lausanne, Switzerland, where she argued against the pathologization of the intersexed, and for the inclusion of intersex female athletes in competitive sport.